Word: himmelfarber
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...essay, she contends that the current academic fad of poststructuralism and its skepticism towards 'meta-narratives' have consciously blurred the distinction between the greatest tragedies and achievements of our civilization. The result is the moral obtuseness and intellectual numbness of many in the academy today, both faculty and students. Himmelfarb shows that postmodernism as an ideology is not at all an abstract debate about the virtues of decentering authors and questioning "modes of emplotment...
Rather, postmodernism's ideology is founded on the defanging of the beasts of twentieth-century evil. Consequently, the Holocaust always lurks menacingly in the background of these essays. In the introduction to the book, Himmelfarb herself calls attention to the Holocaust as a 'rebuke to historians, philosophers and literary critics who, in their zeal for one or another of the intellectual fashions of our time, belittle or demean one of the greatest tragedies of all time...
...Himmelfarb goes on to write that "historians who think it the highest calling of their profession to resurrect 'the daily life of ordinary people' can find little evidence in the daily life of ordinary Germans of the overwhelming fact of life--and of death--for millions of Jews." She contends that "those who look for the 'long-term' processes and impersonal 'structures' in history tend to explain this 'short-term event' in such a way as to explain it away: and those seeking to 'deconstruct' the history of the Holocaust as they deconstruct all of history come perilously close...
...Himmelfarb has perceptively traced the contours of the pestilence that threatens truth, which is the very purpose of the university. But Himmelfarb does more than describe the pestilence. Indeed, employing some of the same lines of argument as Allan Bloom, Himmelfarb confronts this pestilence with the tools of reason and moral virtue that Moderns and Ancients (a term which applies to any one who seeks the truth--rather than truths) share in their joint struggle to beat back the dangerous aspects of the postmodern herd...
...Himmelfarb rightly states that "for the historian, as for the philosopher, the quarrel between the Ancients and the Moderns is being superceded by a quarrel between the Moderns and the Post-moderns. If the greatest subversive principle of modernity is historicism--a form of relativism that locates the meaning of ideas and events so firmly in their historical context that history, rather than philosophy and nature, becomes the arbiter of truth--postmodernism is now confronting us with a far more subversive form of relativism, a relativism so radical, so absolute, as to be antithetical to both history and truth...